Arkona
(written by Islander)
Yesterday I read a story about a recent lobster-boat race across Casco Bay along the coast of Maine. It was won by a man and his 14-year-old daughter, with his daughter at the wheel of their 32-foot diesel-powered fishing boat. The man summarized their race strategy to a reporter: “Point it and punch it!”
Today’s collection includes new music from black metal bands who follow a similar strategy, but it also includes music that reveals a different strategy, something more like “slow it and sink it” (and maybe set it on fire first).
What ties all the music together is the presence of emotionally moving melodies and often the achievement of a certain scale and sweep (vast).
ARKONA (Poland)
In this first song today Arkona visit a city of the dead. With their big percussive engine rumbling and surging, they send bow waves of high searing melody that sound anguished as they rise and fall. Those gleaming waves of orchestration, laced with guitar-fire, become increasingly expansive and wondrous, even with furious snarls in the mix, but the emotional thrust is still stricken.
The big engine briefly falls silent, allowing the music to create a brief spell, and then Arkona open its throttle wide, punching the engine, with drums hammering, the vocalist screaming, the sonic waves rushing by, flashing spray, gloriously exhilarating.
I’ve used seafaring imagery, but the lyric video more suitably uses cemeteries and mausoleums. The lyrics are in Polish, but are translated to English at YouTube, and they’re quite poetic.
“Necropolis” is from Arkona‘s new album Stella Pandora, which will be released by Debemur Morti Productions on September 27th. The label states: “Conceptually, Stella Pandora examines the inevitability of death and the pointlessness of fighting against human destiny: when faith is but a shell aimed at manipulation, myth becomes the only truth in the senselessness of existence.”
EU shop : https://dmprd.com/arkonaEU
US shop : https://dmprd.com/arkonaNA
Bandcamp : https://dmprd.com/arkonaSP
Arkona Website : http://arkonahorde.pl
Arkona Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/arkonahorde
GROZA (Germany)
I’m a bit late catching up to the most recent song and video revealed from Groza‘s new album Nadir (much less the rest of the album), but finally managed to do that yesterday.
In keeping with its name, “Daffodils” is gentle and lovely, drifting and musing, a soft and dreamy spell — but only for the first minute and a half. Then, with a scorching scream, the song becomes much heavier and more harrowing. The glinting opening melody perseveres, but its refrain is surrounded by scorching and slugging sounds.
Groza also punch the intensity, giving the drums the gas and spinning the music like a roiling whirlpool, matched by wild yells and unchained screams. And because it’s a long song, Groza continue ringing in changes, quelling the turbulence and succumbing to moodiness but also extravagantly pounding and dialing the guitars to a fiery boil. But the greatest spectacle is left to the song’s penultimate phase, amplified by choral voices.
The video accompanying the song is an absolutely fascinating (and frightening) thing to see, and makes it even easier to use water-borne imagery in describing the music. I should add that this song includes guest appearances by members of Harikiri for the Sky and Karg.
The other song from Nadir released so far is “Dysthymian Dreams” (I’ve commented about it before but want to do more). It also arrived with a good video, but this one lets us see the band storming from the stage. And the music, unlike that of “Daffodils“, storms right away, wasting no time in getting the listener’s blood racing or letting the vocalist rip his throat open.
However, this is another long song, and so Groza shift gears, rocking and slashing, rumbling and jolting, sending the electric arpeggios spiraling high and the riffage washing in great cascades… but they also pull way back and do again what they did both at the outset of “Daffodils” and again further along in that song, i.e., making the music gentle and slowly drifting, while a voice speaks from some barren hall.
Of course, Groza gradually build the intensity again, and burst things open with an exhilarating sonic typhoon at the close, maximizing the voices and everything else.
Nadir will be released by AOP Records on September 20th.
https://linktr.ee/aoprec
https://www.facebook.com/grozaband
GAEREA (Portugal)
Last week brought us another new song and video from Gaerea‘s new album Coma. This one is named “Unknown“. Lyrically the narrator explains that he is detached from himself, trying to find some identity as life passes by, but remaining a stranger.
There’s a lost and wandering quality to the glimmering music as well, but following some gigantic and momentous percussive booms the riffing starts roiling and writhing in torment and confusion as the vocalists scream and roar the words.
Soft ringing and wavering tones briefly appear again, but it’s just a short breath before the music ascends and expands, with one more short breath still to come, and one more glorious sonic sunrise to follow.
Coma will be released by Season of Mist on October 25th.
https://orcd.co/gaereacoma
https://www.facebook.com/gaerea
AETHYRICK (Finland)
You can probably verify by now that in making my way through candidates for this week’s column, I got caught up in music that tends to ascend and expand, to operate on a sweeping and ravishing scale. The next song does that too.
To be sure, “Beyond All Death” is also a hellish experience. It’s dismal and degraded at first, and even when Aethyrick point and push it, the sweeping waves of sound have a tormented and wretched quality, and the shrieking vocals spray blood.
The drums rattle and blast, but their biggest contribution are to generate enormous booms, which sound like thunder at the world’s end. On the other end of the scale, the band bring in strummed acoustic chords as a different kind of accent and mood, but they don’t stay away from setting the skies on fire for very long, with vibrantly trilling guitar-leads adding more fuel.
The song is from Aethyrick‘s new album (their fifth one), Death Is Absent. It will be released on September 13th by EAL Productions (distributed by NoEvDia).
https://www.noevdia.com/artist/aethyrick/
https://aethyrick.bandcamp.com/album/death-is-absent
https://www.aethyrick.com/
SVRM (Ukraine)
So far I’ve been presenting advance tracks from forthcoming albums, but to end today’s column I’ve got two complete releases, both of them from Ukrainian bands I’ve praised before. The first of them is Svrm and their new EP Мовчання і смерть. Google Translate tells me this means “Silence and death” in English.
I also used Google to translate the Ukrainian names for the EP’s four songs. In addition to the title track, they are: “Their remains”, “Sick blood”, and “Unbearable light”. As the names suggest, there’s nothing comfortable about this music. It was clearly intended to unsettle listeners as Svrm sought their own catharsis.
As Svrm have demonstrated in the past, and as they prove again here, the music is often massively heavy and mauling, crushing forward like an unstoppable avalanche, propelled in part by the pop of gunning drums. By contrast, the guitars also trill far up in the songs’ stratospheric reaches.
Yes, here again, I’ve latched onto music that reaches a ravishing scale. But in creating such experiences, Svrm also infuse the music with feelings of despair and grief — searing tragedy on a grand scale — and the vocals are never less than wrenching and scarring.
On the other hand, Svrm also bring in strummed acoustic melodies with an old folk resonance (a whisper of old memories and traditions), as well as soft and simmering melodies that sound even more forlorn, and the reverberating ring of lonely guitar and piano notes. And in the final song, they eventually mount a defiant march and a blazing charge.
It would be easy to think of this as the music of a war-torn place, even if we didn’t know that it does come from such a place.
https://svrm.bandcamp.com/album/–14
EZKATON (Ukraine)
To close, I’ve picked another recently released complete record by a Ukrainian band. This one is Synaesthesis Monologue by Ezkaton. They explain the evolution of the music this way:
The album was recorded during 2021-2024 in the city of Zdolbuniv in Ukraine. The first 3 compositions of the album were written before the full-scale war with Russia. After all these events, there was a significant pause in writing new material. In the end, it was decided to continue the album, but the inspiration was to write doom metal. Actually, this is why the album turned out to be so diverse, because the worldview changes a lot during the war, and this was reflected in the music.
As foretold, the album’s first three songs differ from the last three, but they’re quite varied in themselves. For example, the first song, “Veil of Twilight Shroud“, incorporates ethereal glinting notes and seductively shimmering synths, as well as the plaintive quaver of violins (or something that sounds like that instrument), but Ezkaton also bring in thrilling balalaika-like trills and surges of cloud-high sonic sweep. At their many zeniths, those majestic yet also harrowing sounds, and the vocalist’s ruinous screams, tend to dominate the throbbing and moaning in the low end.
The next two songs, “Lost in Realms” and “Crimson Tide“, create similar contrasts of sound and mood — soft, melancholy, and spell-casting at times, blazing in the stratosphere at others, but also lost and forlorn — and a crimson tide does surge in the second of those, accompanied by some big thrusting riffs, miserable raking chords, a sorrowful piano, and ultimately a brutal crashing collapse.
Truth be told, all of those first three songs create dark moods of different kinds, so it’s not too shocking that the next three lean more toward doom metal, and of course that’s even less shocking in light of Ezkaton‘s story about the events that produced them.
Yet, don’t be misled into thinking Ezkaton have turned into a completely different band. The last three songs still have many stylistic and instrumental similarities to the first three, including the creation of dramatic contrasts.
The chief differences are the appearance of abyssal, gravel-gargling growls; massive jolting stomps; a heavier bass presence; and a more prominent place for somber, classically influenced piano melodies (especially in “Somber“, where guest Julia Stoliarets sublimely performs on a grand piano).
And sure, the music is also more consistently grief-stricken in the album’s second half, more likely to break your heart and send the pieces plummeting, and the closer “Forevermore” is downright crushing and oppressive; there, the guitars wail like massed mourners; but even in that slow and ponderous song, Ezkaton fashion beauty from the grief too.
It’s very easy to get carried away by this entire album, and the differences within it make it all the more worth having.
https://ezkaton1.bandcamp.com/album/synaesthesis-monologue
https://www.facebook.com/ezkaton.band
https://www.instagram.com/ezkaton_official